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Council Moving Forward; Gets Code Book Online; Focuses On Route 70
By Catherine Snipe
The township council is putting forth a forward-looking message as the municipality works out who its next mayor will be.
“The workflow has not stopped at all,” said Council President Anthony Matthews.
The township council is facing several issues it hopes to bring closure to soon: the former Foodtown site, a community center and Route 70 traffic.
Matthews said these three issues are what council members are focused on for the remainder of the year and as Brick enters 2007.
“We’re doing the business of the township. That’s our number one priority,” he said.
That includes the council’s work to keep health insurance premiums at the same cost for its current and retired employees.
“It’s tremendous to see a zero percent increase in the premiums,” said Councilman Stephen Acropolis, who is chairman of the business and finance committee that helped to secure the zero increase. “Premiums are jumping 27 percent in the private sector … Ours will cost the same it did last year.”
Matthews said the township worked with several firms and spent countless hours to get the rate.
In other business, the council, along with the state, is trying to iron out what to do with Route 70 in order to find the best place for a community center. The Foodtown property, located on Route 70 at the end of Brick Boulevard, remains vacant. At one time, it was the lead candidate for a community center.
“We’ll have to have a committee advice
us. That has to take place with traffion route 70,” said Councilwoman Kathy Russell.
Acropolis emphasized that these projects are important. Attention is being drawn away from these major developments, he argued, because the public is focusing on the resignation of Mayor Joseph C. Scarpelli.
One of those important projects is making the township’s code book available online.
Online Code Book Now Live
It used to be that you had to remember township office hours and locations in order to search Brick Township’s municipal codebook - and then make sure you got there on time.
Now, you just have to remember: e-codes.generalcode.com
That’s the online address of the codebook, which the township contracted the company General Code to put online. The site went live recently.
Now, residents of Brick can access the town’s codebook from their home. The search is free, allowing easier access to information about the town. Everything in the township’s codebook is there, such as how long a council member’s term is or how much a beach badge costs.
Curious about the noise ordinance as your neighbor’s party blasts into the early morning? Now you can peek at the ordinance outside of business hours and see what the local law is.
The move was made to put more information at residents’ fingertips. The hard copies are still available at township offices, made available through the township clerk’s office.
The codebook contains the laws of the township, and numbers several hundred chapters.
The web address is searchable, and the online codebook is new, with its latest update in November 11, when the project of putting the information online was complete.
The searches can be exact matches, or users can pull up matches with the root word or words with similar spelling to the searched word.
The project of putting the code online began last year, with a $26,000 contract that reorganized the codebook and put it on the Internet.
General Code is based in Rochester, NY.
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